Funny Name or Not, Schnorr Is Becoming a Big Deal for Bitcoin

While this cryptocurrency rallying cry is typically used as the price of a coin starts a climb, this time the slogan’s being used to demonstrate excitement over the progress that’s being made on a long-anticipated bitcoin code optimization.

Called Schnorr signatures, the technology looks to replace bitcoin’s existing signature scheme with one that mashes signature data together. The concept is so attractive partly because it clears up space in the blockchain, which should help resolve both the transaction backlog and high fees bitcoin users sometimes need to deal with.

According to developers working on the technology, the change would lead to an estimated 25 percent to 30 percent boost in bitcoin’s transaction capacity.

Yannick Seurin, a cryptographer at French cybersecurity agency ANSSI, who’s been working on the cryptography behind Schnorr, told CoinDesk:

“Schnorr signatures and the applications they enable generate high hopes. As evidenced by the recent scaling debate, any efficiency improvement is highly beneficial to bitcoin.”

Indeed, the bitcoin community has united around several technologies to make bitcoin more efficient, and as such, cheaper, faster and easier to use for payments. Schnorr is just one of many, joining FIBRE network, peer-to-peer optimizations, and, the most ambitious of all, the upcoming Lightning Network.

But Schnorr has recently become the focus of some of bitcoin’s most renowned developers.

This is not only due to Segregated Witness (SegWit) being activated on bitcoin finally (a technology Schnorr relies on) but also the other benefits Schnorr signatures offer, like improving privacy on certain types of transactions and reducing spam known to clog up the network.

Jonas Nick, for example, told CoinDesk he’s interested in the privacy advantages, no surprise for the Blockstream infrastructure security engineer. Yet, he’s also enticed by how it could work hand in hand with other code changes to unlock more advanced bitcoin use cases.

“I’m particularly excited to work towards the goal where smart contracts look like normal payments on chain. Schnorr signatures play a crucial role there, along